“Kandy, can you get Lara’s vehicle moving?” Desmond asked.
Kandy shook her head. “Looks like he poured acid all over the engine.”
Desmond growled and started back toward our SUV.
“Wait,” I cried. “Can’t you track them?”
“No,” Desmond answered. He held the back door open for Audrey, who climbed in with the gray wolf still in her arms.
“The trail ends right here,” Kandy murmured in my ear as she stepped by me.
“But all that alpha magic,” I said. I had a hard time believing that Desmond could exert so much control over the shifters and not track them magically.
“Jeremy hasn’t been with us long. He’s pack by birth, but he isn’t bound to Desmond like some of us are. That comes later, by choice. Jeremy’s going away for school in the fall.”
Oh, shit.
“Desmond or I, or any of the werewolves with good tracking abilities, could eventually find them. But the quicker the better, right?”
“The gift,” I muttered.
“Yeah. Let’s go see what the sorcerer left you.”
That didn’t sound like so much fun anymore. The only thing I could cling to, so that I didn’t drown in my fear for Mory, was that I couldn’t taste any of her magic in the area. Dead or alive I should be able to feel her magic if it was near. So whatever hurt Jeremy and Lara hadn’t hurt the fledgling necromancer … yet.
∞
A small gold-plated, hinged box sat on an antique mahogany plant stand in the middle of what appeared to be a very dusty, neglected barbershop.
We had dropped Audrey and Lara back at Desmond’s house. The gray wolf was still conscious but panting in pain. Desmond was actually twisting the steering wheel in his hands. I wasn’t sure how much the steering column could take and still function. But it had at least lasted until we pulled up to an abandoned strip mall somewhere outside of West Portland. Even the ‘For Lease’ sign had fallen, neglected, half off its posts.
Kandy stood outside waiting by the SUV. She’d done a patrol around the entire complex before I’d been allowed to step out of the vehicle. Even though I could clearly feel only Scarlett and Kett inside.
My mother, her face as serious as I’d ever seen it, was holding some sort of spell over the box when we entered the barbershop.
Footsteps leading to and from the door stood out in the thick dust on the linoleum floor. A few massively sized ones with claws tracked around the inner perimeter of the walls as well. McGrowly investigating, I guessed.
“It’s spelled,” Scarlett said. “But not necessarily maliciously. Did you try to remove it from the stand or simply open it?”
“Remove it,” Kett answered. The disdain in his cool smooth voice was completely obvious to me. His expressions and moods were as subtle as Desmond’s were wild. I’d really been spending too much time with the vampire.
“Blackwell’s magic,” I said. I could taste that much even without touching the box.
“Yes?” Scarlett asked as she dropped her spell.
I instantly missed the comforting taste of her magic. It still lingered, of course, wherever my mother was, but was so much more intense when she was casting. I could remember her using a similar spell occasionally on me the few times I’d been sick as a child.
“Not Sienna?” my mother prodded.
I shook my head. No. My sister’s magic was so distinctive now that I would have tasted it from the car even with the doors and windows closed.
“Is Lara all right?” Scarlett asked Desmond over my shoulder as I crossed the room to look at the box.
“She will be, scion. Thank you for your concern,” Desmond answered as he followed on my heels.
Scarlett inclined her head and returned to her examination of the box. Though Desmond had answered her with a formal tone, her question was not that of a diplomat. She actually cared about Lara. The realization startled me. Scarlett had always seemed frivolous and fun. Free with her friends and relationships. Maybe she cared so deeply that maintaining close ties to many people was difficult for her? Was that why she’d come and gone from my childhood? There for all the good times and the bad, but absent in between?
I shook off my self-absorbed thoughts and focused on the box. I hovered my fingers over it but nothing leaped out to bite me, which was always a good first sign. I could see the tinge of Blackwell’s magic coating the box. It didn’t feel like it was trying to repel me. But then, I couldn’t see or taste my own magic in the way I saw others’, so I couldn’t be completely sure.
I touched the lid.
Desmond snarled behind me.
Nothing else happened. “Spelled to me, I think.”
“Blackwell shouldn’t be able to be so specific,” Scarlett said. “Without something of yours … blood, hair. I sensed none of those foundations here.”
I shrugged, losing patience with the not-immediately-tracking-Mory aspect of the afternoon. I didn’t want to sit around analyzing everything to death. Kett on his own could spend weeks just looking at the box. This was totally why I made cupcakes and not wedding cakes. An aspect of my personality I accepted years and years ago. If a customer ever wanted a fancy custom order, Bryn did the decorating.
I flipped open the lid. A gold ball the diameter of a quarter sat nestled in a purple velvet cushion within the box.
“Expensive,” I muttered. Even not knowing the weight of it, I could tell this wasn’t just some pretty gold-plated ball bearing.
“Spelled?” Kett asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. “See the solder join? It holds some sort of spell like those silver balls Hoyt uses for his curses.”
This spell ball was twice the size of Hoyt’s ball bearings and made out of gold, so a hasty guess placed it way higher on the power scale as well.
Scarlett raised her hands — probably to cast her diagnosis spell — but I simply plucked the gold ball out of its nest.
My mother gasped. Yeah, I was tired of talking.
The ball rolled in my open palm, then settled in the center. The spell contained within it tried to attach itself to me. I pushed it back into the sphere. It resisted, but then settled back.
“It’s a compulsion spell. Like Blackwell placed on his invitation letter to force Hoyt to deliver it only to me. It’s supposed to force me to ... I don’t know. Follow it?”
“You have it under control, Jade?” Scarlett asked. I saw worry lines on her forehead that I’d never noticed before. They looked permanent. I seriously hoped I wasn’t putting them there, but who was I kidding?
I rolled the gold sphere in my fingers, tasting Blackwell’s magic like the fine wine it reminded me of. “Do you think Mory’s at the other end?” I asked no one in particular.
“He clearly wants something from you,” Kett answered.
“Yeah. Sienna mentioned something she wanted me to do for her.”
Scarlett sighed. “I thought you were speaking metaphorically.”
“I wasn’t.”
Scarlett sighed again.
Geez. It’s not like I’d had hours to dissect my torturous conversation with my sister with her.
“Can you follow the spell or not, dowser?” Desmond asked.
I lifted my hand and pointed a finger.
“Due west,” Kett said.
Desmond dug his phone out of his pocket as he crossed out of the barbershop. At least someone else wanted to be moving as badly as I did.
“Blackwell would make a good vampire,” Kett said.
“Find him clever, do you?” Scarlett was clearly not impressed.
Kett reached over and flipped the lid shut on the small box. The spell on it had disappeared once I’d retrieved the gold sphere. “No,” he said. “Overly convoluted, heavy handed, and obvious.”
“That makes him good vamp material?” I asked as I crossed out of the shop. Kett slipped the gold-plated box into his pocket and didn’t answer me.
&
nbsp; Scarlett hung back, texting.
“Mom, let’s go. Who could you possibly be texting?”
“Pearl,” Scarlett answered. She slipped her phone into the outside pocket of her purse and followed me out of the shop.
“Gran is texting?” The world was indeed coming to an end. Gran was a traditional witch. Technology wasn’t her friend. I had always thought her magic fundamentally rejected cell phones and whatnot. If she spent too much time near electronics, her magic eventually fried it.
“I bought her the phone before we left. I found a spell to protect it from her magic, though I’m not sure how long it will last. I had to be careful how I phrased things yesterday, as she was getting Todd to answer for her, but then she figured it out.”
My phone pinged as I climbed into the SUV. I pulled it out. It was a text message from my grandmother.
Jade.
Be careful.
Take care of Scarlett.
I love you.
Gran texting. Yep, it was the end of days.
∞
The gold sphere led us seriously west. As in, all the way to the Oregon Coast.
“Where are we?” I asked, after peering out the window at the waning sun over the Pacific Ocean failed to illuminate me.
“Near Florence,” Kandy answered. That really didn’t offer any clarification.
We were driving up a steep hill that offered a craggy cliff drop to our left and what looked to be a series of hiking trails to our right. If I glanced back, south, I could see the famous Oregon dunes, but the sphere had tugged me north when we’d reached the end of west.
A building, perched on the edge of the cliff, came into view as we rounded an S-curve. A building with a rather touristy billboard.
“Turn in here,” I said.
“What?” Kandy answered, as the SUV sped past the entrance.
“Turn here!”
Desmond reached over from the passenger seat and cranked the wheel left. Kandy hit the brakes and we skidded into the half-empty parking lot through the exit.
We all sat quietly. I, somehow forced to sit between Scarlett and Kett in the back seat, eased myself off the vampire where I’d been thrown against him. My mother and Kett had left their car at the strip mall, deeming that smarter than taking a chance on us getting separated.
Desmond let go of the wheel. Kandy half-heartedly straightened the SUV into an actual parking spot and then turned off the vehicle.
We all cranked our necks to stare up at the billboard. It read Sea Lion Caves, with the subhead World’s Largest Sea Cave beside a life-sized picture of a sea lion. Though I’d never seen a golden sea lion before.
“Okay. What the hell are we doing here?” Kandy said.
“I wasn’t going to be the first to ask,” I muttered.
“The sphere is directing you to the building, Jade?” Scarlett asked. The building in question was a rectangle of beige siding with a red clay-tile roof. It was surrounded by — of all things — a white picket fence.
“I don’t think so. Farther away. Down? Maybe the beach? Can we get to the beach here?”
“No. Fuck,” Desmond said. Then he all but threw himself out of the SUV and stomped into the building.
“I’m missing something.”
“The caves, Jade,” Scarlett said. Then she also exited.
I climbed out as well. Kandy and Scarlett followed Desmond into the gift shop, but I wandered over to the edge of the property. I stood on a cliff that looked like it was the end of the world, which was exceedingly appropriate based on how I was currently feeling … or, rather, trying not to feel.
It wasn’t the end of the world. Just the end of North America, which for some was the same difference. I hadn’t ever been off the continent myself. There was too much old magic, I now knew, in Europe. An Adept of power would take one look at me and know what I was … or rather what I wasn’t, which was not purely a witch. I still couldn’t wrap my head around how Gran had persuaded me not to travel after high school. She was that good.
Waves crashed into rocks hundreds of feet below me, with nothing but ocean from me all the way to China … or maybe Japan. I always got that mixed up.
The gold sphere urged me to continue, but there was no more road or path.
I turned as I felt Kandy approaching from the gift shop. “Closes in thirty minutes,” she said. “We’ll hop a ride on the elevator and take a look around after.” She handed me a brochure.
“America’s biggest sea grotto,” I read from it.
“You think the chocolate is any good here?” Kandy asked.
“Since when does chocolate need to be a certain quality for you?”
Kandy laughed. “You’re a bad influence.”
Scarlett and Kett, who was hiding out behind his baseball hat and sunglasses again, approached.
“Caves,” I said to them. “You think Blackwell is hanging out in some sea lion cave with a captive werewolf and necromancer?”
“What do your senses tell you, dowser?” Kett asked.
“Nothing.” I snapped. I wasn’t interested in being schooled right now.
“He won’t be in the main cave,” Scarlett murmured. She looked over the pictures in the brochure she’d lifted off me while I was gearing up for my hissy fit.
“Then there must be others, perhaps hidden,” Kett answered.
I walked away. The sphere wanted me to move, so I did. I crossed the strip of grass toward the walkway that led to the side of the building. I leaned against the fence. From here, I could see the carefully manicured paved paths on the property about twenty feet below. One led south across this wide shelf, jutting out a hundred feet or so over the ocean, to a lookout point complete with coin-operated binoculars. The second led north to — according to the helpful sign — the elevator and another lookout point. Farther north, I could see a picture-perfect, red-topped white lighthouse. Too bad it wasn’t a picture-perfect sort of day.
I knew there was a reason I was always last to figure things out. It wasn’t because I was self-absorbed, though I definitely was and that probably didn’t help matters. It was because I had less experience than everyone else. Desmond looked only a few years older than me, but he ran an entire community of shapeshifters. Kett was hundreds of years old. Scarlett had traveled the world many times over. Also, both Scarlett and Kett already apparently knew a lot about Blackwell.
No one knew Sienna like I did, though. And that was scarier than being ignorant and slow. Because once again, this was somehow all tied to my magic. Jeremy and Mory wouldn’t even have met, let alone been kidnapped together, if my magic hadn’t brought me to Blackwell’s attention.
So, yeah. I got that we were walking into a trap so obviously engineered by my sister that I’m sure everyone else got it too. Of course, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to walk into it. What else could I do?
I thought about leaping the fence and dropping down to the path below, then taking those last hundred steps to the elevator and leaving everyone else behind.
Then what? Threaten Blackwell with my knife? I’m sure he had plenty of magical knives of his own. Plus that nifty amulet that might also be a transportation device. And Sienna had bested me in the alley. It might have looked like I’d won the battle, but I wasn’t going to win the war. You had to kill to win wars. Could I kill my sister?
“You’re dwelling,” Scarlett said as she settled beside me with her back to the fence. “It’s unlike you.”
“I feel like I don’t know anything. Like I barely know myself. I had everything sorted before.”
Scarlett laughed, softly. “Shall I tell you that this is just life? Because it is. Or shall I reinforce your feelings and remind you that three months ago, you thought you were half-human, and that we still haven’t figured out that riddle yet.”
“Or should you just kick me out of the nest and see if I fly?”
“Oh, you fly, my Jade. You soar.”
&n
bsp; My chest constricted at the pride in my mother’s voice. Pride I felt utterly unworthy of.
Scarlett laid her hand across mine. I continued to clutch the top of the fence with both hands. Her magic danced across my skin and settled my thoughts.
“Did you always know you could do that?” I asked. “Or did you learn?”
“Pearl Godfrey’s child doesn’t learn,” Scarlett answered. “She is born fully actualized.”
“And when you had to learn?” I was full of questions today.
“I was a disappointment.”
“So Gran was more careful with me, then.”
“Was she? She made it clear I wasn’t to interfere. And honestly, I thought it was better … I thought you’d have a better childhood with Pearl as your caregiver, rather than me. And I was so very scared to lose you. That someone would take you away. Pearl protected you. Pearl loved you so fiercely. I only got in her way. I should have … I should have stepped up quicker.”
Silence settled between us. My mother had said so much in so few words that I wasn’t too sure how to start sorting through it.
“Who were you worried would take me? My father?”
“No, I … How would he know? I looked for him. I asked, but I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t have a baby in Queensland. I had to go home to Pearl.”
“Would he … do you think he would have wanted me?”
“I have no idea. He was magnificent. Strong, fierce, and he laughed. When he laughed it felt like the world laughed with him. But we didn’t talk, you understand. Not more than passing whispers with the magic of the moon and the Kalkadoon … the Aboriginals all around us. We were called together and we answered.”
Scarlett had told me all of this, in slightly different ways, the night Sienna had tried to force me to open the portal in the bakery basement. Then, as now, I could hear so many nuances within her words. My father thrilled and scared her. It was the scared part that freaked me out. What could scare my mother, whose magic soothed all those touched by it?
“Kett says he can tell me what magic is in my blood.”
Scarlett laughed. “Just like a man to tell you anything you want to hear to get in your pants and then forget his promises the next morning. A vampire will say anything for permission to bite you.”
Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic Page 22
